my thoughts when i heard the idea was a semi-realistic space management game, build your base as big as you want but bigger makes it harder to fulfill all the inhabitants needs and that causes more problems, till the space base itself blows up, no aliens or combat, just you and your inhabitants. Looking forward to play anyhow

I’m not really a forum kinda guy but watching the feed I was struck with an idea that might work for the game. Perhaps docking ships that have specialists on board, such as medical or scientific staff. These ships will also come with specialist equipment. Perhaps these can then stay docked and become in themselves a permanent specialist building. This then brings with it it’s own challenges and rewards. Such as how to keep these running and attaching them to your current infrastructure.

I was just browsing tumblr from a game designer(Whintney Hills) I saw on twitter and found this on her tumblr and it SCREAMS space base. Figured the team might like it as well, btw her blog has great environmental reference all over it!

I’ve been obsessed with the concept of space and what we’ll do when we’re up there since about age 6. I’ve been playing space games since Codename Mat/Moonfall/Earth Orbit Station on the Commodore 64.

I think being able to design motifs for your individual round could be fun - somebody designing a space prison would come up with something very different than somebody designing a space hotel. I don’t think you need to get down to the minutia of the objects - just a few simple things like being able to lay out different types of hallways and public spaces would suffice.

I always imagine crewmembers as employees for a Space Corporation. I’d like to see demotions for the truly inept [a geneticist turned space miner turned cyborg part manufacturer turned sewage technician turned assistant assistant] as well as people manipulating their way up the ranks.

Part of the fun of Dwarf Fortress is expanding despite outside forces. I imagine infiltration by shapeshifters/spies/bandits/space commies could provide friction. For example, if a few crewmembers are sent on secret missions to kill a target or sabotage the engines, the player could choose a side or prevent anything from happening. Maybe the player has to protect the ship’s captain, or the cargo supplies, or other random mission objectives that serve as an extra little impetus to interact and respond to threats.

Much like SimCity, disaster options could be interesting. Turn off Atmospherics and watch people slowly suffocate to death. Turn off deflector shields and watch meteors rip your station in half. Malfunctioning teleporters release a plague of multidimensional space bees.

I don’t know how much the player is supposed to be like the ship’s AI or just a distant god figure. If AI, having cyborgs and robots to destroy the world could be interesting. Cleaningbots try to scrub the bacteria off everyone, effectively devouring their skin in seconds before a janitorborg throws the writhing bodies into the incinerator. Chefbots throws people into a food processor and sells harvested organs.

For example, if a few crewmembers are sent on secret missions to kill a target or sabotage the engines, the player could choose a side or prevent anything from happening. Maybe the player has to protect the ship’s captain, or the cargo supplies, or other random mission objectives that serve as an extra little impetus to interact and respond to threats.

Much like SimCity, disaster options could be interesting. Turn off Atmospherics and watch people slowly suffocate to death. Turn off deflector shields and watch meteors rip your station in half. Malfunctioning teleporters release a plague of multidimensional space bees.

I don’t know how much the player is supposed to be like the ship’s AI or just a distant god figure. [...]

That’s great stuff. Interestingly, this kind of brings the AF concept of Milgrim into the realm of Spacebase. Your ideas immediately made me think of the player as a potential HAL 9000 kind of operator who is presented with the option of “solving” various challenges - such as the preventing of a band of villains (or “heroes”!) from achieving a goal (“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave”)

Now, the AF scope of Spacebase is probably pretty much set in stone now - but should the game continue to be developed it seems to me the game concept lends itself very well to all sorts of themed challenge variations such as this acting as DLC “plug-ins” to the game.

Can I just say that this idea is $#@(ing genius? It’s humorous and cute, and instantly presents feedback in a context that’s familiar to just about anybody of this generation. I found myself instantly relating to this little character because I can totally see some of my facebook friends posting those exact statuses.

Can I just say that this idea is $#@(ing genius? It’s humorous and cute, and instantly presents feedback in a context that’s familiar to just about anybody of this generation. I found myself instantly relating to this little character because I can totally see some of my facebook friends posting those exact statuses.

I was just browsing tumblr from a game designer(Whintney Hills) I saw on twitter and found this on her tumblr and it SCREAMS space base. Figured the team might like it as well, btw her blog has great environmental reference all over it!

I was just browsing tumblr from a game designer(Whintney Hills) I saw on twitter and found this on her tumblr and it SCREAMS space base. Figured the team might like it as well, btw her blog has great environmental reference all over it!

One of the first things I notice when you were showing the concept art was how all the ‘space stations of the future’ tend to have the torus/halo shape going for it. Considering the whole space motif, I couldn’t help but wonder how interesting it would be to actually have your space base represented like that in game.

Like when you try to scroll left or right when viewing rooms in your base, instead of just shifting the grid left or right the camera would rotate along the radius of the torus, while moving up or down would move you along the length. Zero Gravity would allow rooms to be above and below one another in the world space, with the player camera in the center looking outward at one side at a time. The space simians could walk in the left direction and come back to the same point you started at, or do the same walking forward since the circle comes back around.

Of course actual game play couldn’t view the entire space at the same time in the grid mode and the view space would still be 2d, but I wonder if camera tricks could be used to give it that feeling. And that type of cylindrical shape would give it a different building feel then typical flat blueprints in dwarf fortress style games; and allow for the player to build potentially unique structures given that different cyclical space to work in.

I had a fun Spacebase idea: A head that’s a small alien sitting on a chair and controlling the body somehow (like from the first Men in Black movie, except not hidden). I’m not sure if it would fit in well with the other character designs, but it would probably look hilarious.

EDIT: Just saw on the livestream that Say Oh is way ahead of me with an even more awesome idea! Very excited to see it in the game!

Watching the livestream, what sold me on Space Base was actually the stories people were telling afterwards. The murdered loose on the ship, locked away before you are forced to let him back in the public to try to heal a plague is such a cool idea.

I want to see a little more of the Dwarf Fortress style gameplay that was conceptualized (kind of like the above story), but if this game can get that response simply with a prototype then there might be something great to mine here.

Looks like Spacebase really allows for some serious messing around to craziness just to see what happens and the UI seems really intuitive and easy to pick up, which was my biggest fear. So in terms of concept… making a dwarf fortress like game that a casual player could enjoy, they did their job, at least from the stream it looks like it.